GORMAN BEAUCHAMP
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implications of totalitarianism...which should have been foreseeable
10-20
years ago." The instance that most brutally exemplifies his
premise is the decade-long war against genetics that came to be known
as the Lysenko affair.
T. D. Lysenko, an agronomist who came to prominence by drawing
unwarranted conclusions from haphazard experiments, spearheaded and
became the symbol of the "dialectical" approach to science-that is, the
effort to mesh science with Marxist dogma (particularly as Comrade
Stalin defined that dogma). Twentieth-century genetics had abandoned
the Lamarckian theory that acquired characteristics are heritable, in favor
of the Mendelian theory of random mutation: so that, while geneticists
did not deny that environment had an effect on heredity-did not deny
that, in the long run, mutations arise from external as well as internal con–
ditions-still they held that such mutations have an indirect, chaotic
nature. There exists, that is, no direct connection between heredity and
environment, certainly no possibility of
directing
changes in heredity
through manipulation of the environment. No fact was more firmly estab–
lished among geneticists than the indeterminate, undirected nature of
mutation. Such a view, however, was anathema to Marxists and, indeed,
to millenarians generally, who wanted to believe, in Ortega y Gasset's for–
mulation, that what man has is not a nature but a history. Lysenko and
his allies rejected gene theory, then,
a priori-as
bourgeois and metaphys–
ical, the reactionary denial of the forces of progress.
I. I.
Prezent,
Lysenko's chief collaborator, declared in
1937
at a meeting of Soviet sci–
entists:
"It
is possible to alter the heredity nature of the plant." For geneti–
cists this is the equivalent of arguing that two times two equals five.
Still, the Lysenkoists (or Michurinists, as partisans of this persuasion
were usually called) prevailed in the Soviet Union, not by experimenta–
tion-their experiments were dismissed by the Nobel laureate geneticist
H.
J.
Muller as "mummery"-but by diktat. Tentatively at first, but ever
more aggressively, the pseudo-science of dialectics drove out the real sci–
ence of genetics, in which Russia, in previous decades, had excelled. The
authority of Lysenko as a science czar depended on the favor of Stalin,
who was, in fact, credited-among his many towering intellectual
achievements-with having "inspired the Michurinists in their fight
against neo-Darwinism as an idealistic perversion of biology." Appeals
to the Great Leader were frequently made to decide scientific questions,
as the testimony of this investigator reveals:
Encouraging me with friendly paternal words, Stalin gave me
advice. And in his wise counsel there was such crystal clarity, such
